Greetings, Forum! I'm a well-versed "Windows Geek" that is falling in love with LINUX, and I know that I still have a WHOLE LOT TO LEARN!!

I've been running Mint 18 for about a year now in a dual-boot configuration, with Linux being the primary/default in GRUB.

I set it up to auto-mount the Windows XP partition at boot up, and about 75% of the time, it does.

It is that other 25% that is annoying. When it fails to mount, there is a delay of 10 ~ 20 seconds before the MATE desktop appears. When it does, the Windows drive icon is not there. I cannot "see" that drive in the "Computer" file manager, either. It is simply "invisible" to Linux. Restart, and there it is! (Or not, then a 2'nd restart brings it up, and it's fine.)

I still have to use Windows XP now and then, because my Lexmark S415 All-in-One scanner absolutely refuses to work in Linux. (It's screwed-up driver would sometimes flood my kernel.log and syslog files, making them literally fill the HD until it crashed!)

In another post, on another topic, one of the Gurus here said to post the following from the Terminal, so I share it here for your analysis. Note that this is with the Windows partition visible and working:

~ $ cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=7a46b807-77ed-4f3c-9fa8-fe65f79c9fce / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=72f15a76-a1db-414e-98d0-6a679583a764 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/disk/by-uuid/8618238118236EFD /mnt/8618238118236EFD auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show,x-gvfs-name=WindowsXP 0 0